Recently, I attended a day course about using LinkedIn for business run by the Local Enterprise Office. This course looked at your personal page and your business page. I am familiar with LinkedIn and have a personal page that I try to keep updated and informative. The company business page does exist but is a little sparse and needs a face lift.

The course looked into building up your friends or connections and how useful these new found “friends” can be. The lecturer, Noel Davidson, stressed that it is not about adding everyone in mass and having thousands of connections but about the type of people you connect with – quality not quantity.

We also looked at joining groups that concern your type of business or your own hobbies. There are two different types of groups – Open and Closed. Closed groups are monitored and you must ask the moderators to join whereas open groups are the opposite and you are free to come and go.Groups can be very useful in business and with personal pages as they can be used for discussions, promotions, jobs (advertising and seeking) and marketing research.

We also spoke about posting and what kind of content to post. This was the part I was very interested in as when you are posting out to the masses under the company name, it needs to be interesting and relevant. Noel spoke about the 80 – 20 rule. 80% general posting and 20% about your business as you don’t want to spam people with “look at us aren’t we wonderful” posts.

This is something that I was not aware of, I understand not to boast about your business but before the course I was convinced I must always be posting about our business and projects we are doing. Noel has found that “Givers Get” and what he means by that is posting interesting articles about general topics makes your more informative and approachable.

LinkedIn can be a great promotional tool. It is free and manned by you. It is very simple to use and is laid out well. Once you have dressed your personal or business profile well you are a “click away from business”. This shows that by representing yourself well online new business could be just around that social media corner.

This is my task – to take on the Business page using my new skills in LinkedIn to make the Visual ID business page into a beacon of Knowledge and Connections!